With the explosion of information and apps, it is ever harder to find and understand information in context. This includes the following scenarios in collaborative information management:
1. finding information we have seen or thought in the past,
2. understanding sources and details of what we did or is shared with us,
3. accessing confidential information, and
4. reusing others' information with the tools we want.
Digital information surely can not be found if it was lost or not captured in first place. Improving search technology is not enough, because there are root problems that make information very hard to find. First, while humans think of relationships among pieces of information, these may be hard or impossible to get captured with current apps: very important input from humans gets lost. Second, digital information gets replicated and scattered around devices, apps, accounts, and people, resulting in the loss of important relationships among who-what-when.
State of the art information technology (IT) works as here explained and shown in FIG. 1. While our mental ideas contain relationships among bits and pieces of information, the new info we create with apps fails to capture those relationships, and instead replicates existing info with no trace to its origins. We share in three ways: messages, groups, and public. A message is the easiest way to share what I want exactly with whom I want; however, messages can't be tracked, and may be forwarded to unintended recipients. Group sharing is good for predefined groups of people, but it's too rigid: in reality, groups and objectives may be dynamic, creative, unstructured, and involuntary. Last, the public web lets the whole world access the info.